Assuming the heat doesn't kill me, we will be back with another SKA focused month. Although the there will be a bit more of a shift towards funneling some extra dev time into Liora. Let's take a look into the weekly breakdown.
Week 1: We concluded SKA development last month with the completion of True Love's Business getting found (ed. This week I plan to follow-up on it: Implement the Lady Charlotte marriage event, update the investor events to make sense if you trigger them post-founding, add some NPCs / NPCs dialogue variations to show the impact of the imitation True Love's Blessing rings on the citizens, etc.
Week 2: And back to Liora we go. The plan is easy: Close out the side infection zones by creating the second Darklake area.
Week 3: Some time ago we reached the goal to have our assistant writer Absurdity back on the team and hopefully here I will be able integrate his first contribution since being back: If you left the toll bandits alive and finished the reverse summoning ritual, they will get a job at the brothel as guards with the nice perk of getting to use the brothel with a group discount :) Unlocking them as new customers. The new customer scenes will be written by Absurdity, we discussed that I receive the first version beginning of July so I should be able to post the manuscript for this soon.
Since I "just" need to review, edit and implement the scenes, I should have some more time left over, which we can then spend on doing some more pushing on the Liora development. With the gameplay loop for the midgame infection zone dungeon crawling complete, we can now properly evaluate the effects of extra difficulty modifiers from a Hard Mode. I plan to implement and balance that in the rest of the week and if I have time left over I want to take another look at the NG+ system. Currently, it's basically just a copy&paste from SKA, I want to at least adjust it to Liora by having separate NG+ configurations for Liora and Rean.
Week 4: And then it's full on back to SKA. With the Hermann main story content done, we can move on to the effects of his new content to the ending. I will start with the corruption ending where Georgia will undergo the marriage ceremony and vow to keep buffing Richard with her Zenith spell for all time to come.
There are some extra variations for the endings I would love to make such as Hermann and Roland competing with each other in a sex scene and or a scene where Hermann gracefully offers Nadia to "rehearse" her upcoming marriage at True Love's Business and ends up stealing the stolen girl. Whether that will happen this update or next, we will have to see, it largely depends on the CG production timeline.
EDIT:
Week 5: I misscounted the weeks. Apparantly this is a 5-week update. For the last week I will be taking my vacation week and otherwise use it to just wrap up ongoing work and integrate assets from our freelancers.
That's what I will be working on, let's take a look at our freelancers:
RPGMDev
Up till now, our primariy focuses have been: UI/UX, Code infrastructure improvements, technical features, quality of life improvements, content development support.
There were sometimes some high-value exceptions, but I have actively avoided focusing on items that are primarily visual and feel improvements, usually called "juice" in gamedev. I'm not goot at them and Trihan also doesn't have a strong artistic side, so I expect our efficiency here not to be too gread. However, we have reached a point where we have taken care of so many high-value items that diving deeper into this direction makes a lot of sense. Plus the juice items that I had in mind also provide a minor UX improvement, so it's still kinda aligned with our development focuses.
Now, after that preamble, onto the actual work: Trihan will be working on expending the combat system with some minor effects that will allow flying enemies to visually show that they are flying and phase-shift enemies will have some fadein/fadeout effects. It should make things look a bit less static in combat while also better highlighting important states like flight.
As a third item, Trihan will try his hand at a small day transition UI animation thingy at the end of day to show which elemental days are upcoming next.
Art
No changes on the art plan, our scheduled CGs are currently still in the pipeline. I have decided that the anal sex scene will be receiving a full CG instead of just being a minor variation of the current scene since I believe it would otherwise become visually too repetitive.
The Ariadne Begging CG will most likely be cut as the way I wrote the scene, there isn't really a time for it to trigger.
Aaaaaaand that's the plan for July. (Again, assuming I don't spontaneously combust into flames.)